'Truth spoken without moderation reverses itself'
This blog is a source for intellectual exploration. It includes a list of alternative resources and a source of free books. The placement of an article does not imply that I agree with it, merely that I found it thought-provoking. There are also poems and book reviews. Texts written by me are labelled. Readers are free to re-post anything they like.

Monday, December 12, 2016

Angela Mitropoulos - ‘Post-factual’ readings of neoliberalism, before and after Trump

... the intellectual
effort - renewed in the immediate wake of Trump’s election - to distinguish the
dynamics of class or capitalism from those of race, gender, and sexuality
indicate a reluctance to confront the significance of the latter in the
contemporary organization of capitalism and, at the same time, a willingness to
downplay, if not tacitly accept, the liberal and, more so, neoliberal obsession
with “law and order,” border controls, criminalization, the regulation of
sexuality and reproduction.

There is a refusal to admit that these have never
been some occasional anomaly or authoritarian paradox that periodically emerges
in the practices of an otherwise ideal adherence to liberty and free markets.
On the contrary, they are functionally presupposed by an understanding of the
economy as a natural order, as an oikonomia. This is why the
euphemistically-described “alt-Right” alignments of white supremacists and
white nationalists around Trump like to accuse their (male) opponents of being
“cucks” (or “cuckolded”), because it raises anxiety about patriarchal rights
and paternity. It is also why Jo Cox’s murderer regarded her support for asylum
seekers as tantamount to being a “race traitor.” From an oikonomic view, the
regulation of sexuality and gender ensures the legitimate rights over and
reproduction of “household property,” whether that household is envisaged as
the private household of familial affection or the family company or the
enthno-nation. And whiteness is a property, as Cheryl Harris carefully
explained long ago.

Liberal concepts of “self-regulation” still turn on someone
or something ensuring—whether through personalized authority, or abstractly
encoded in private or public law—conformity to the rules of heritable and transmissible
property rights. The state can narrow down to guaranteeing just this, through
force of law and administration, and it will not be “small government” but
instead a massive, authoritarian and intrusive project. And this is, precisely,
the terms on which race, gender, and sexuality emerge as objects of regulation,
criminalization, and control. It is, of course, far easier to buy into the myth
that “neoliberalism means deregulation or free markets” when one exists on the
naturalized because normative side of those demarcations.

In other words, there
has been no shift to the kind of world which critics of neoliberalism
describe—what has occurred is a shift in the manner and objects of regulation,
a decades-long turn to stricter (and in many cases ferocious) border controls,
the transfer of welfare from individuals to normative households (“white
working families”) and corporations, and private interest has been defined as
the investment in household, heritable wealth and human capital which, in
practice, has amplified the racial-gendered dimensions of economics and the
demarcations of legal personhood. It is not, for instance, trivial that Ronald
Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s terms in office - routinely cited as the advent
of neoliberalism - were marked by “law and order” campaigns, the “War on Drugs,”
denunciations of promiscuity, and calls for a return to “traditional morality.”

What is remarkable is that, like the person who brushes off racist or sexist
insults because they do not negatively affect them, so many theorists and
commentators propagate the idea that the proliferation of unfreedoms and deep
conservatism was not integral to neoliberalism—indeed, the necessary corollary
of the pivotal transfer of risk to private households and familial trusts through
financial instruments—and therefore not subject to critique so much as
available to be more or less explicitly and self-evidently embraced. This is
how the global, political diagram of ethno-nationalism emerged, pressed forward
by assumptions shared by both the advocates of neoliberalism and its
superficial critics.

In 1939, the Danish
philosopher Svend Ranulf published “Scholarly Forerunners of Fascism.” In that
essay he argued that late nineteenth-century sociologists such as Auguste
Comte, Émile Durkheim, and Ferdinand Tönnies—“for the most part unintentionally
and unconsciously—served to prepare the soil for fascism.” On the face of it,
these names represent quite different strands within the discipline. Comte and
Durkheim saw in statistical methods a means of validating moral norms while
diagnosing the frequency of deviance. Tönnies lamented the destruction of the
unique essence preserved in a “community [Gemeinschaft] of blood.” Yet
what they nevertheless agreed upon was that society was “headed for disaster
because of its individualism and liberalism and that a new social solidarity
was needed.” From the 1920s, fascist movements would describe much the same
historical course as “degeneracy,” and pose their own brutal but, by their
view, necessary and eventually final “solutions” involving the elimination of
deviants, the restoration of ostensibly proper forms of economic generation,
and the return to a true and natural social order.

Contemporary
intellectual sources may not be Comte, Durkheim, and Tönnies. They are Karl
Polanyi and Ulrich Beck, both of whom viewed contemporary capitalism through
the lens of a decline in “social solidarity” set against a romantic, indeed
mythic, view of pre-modern society. Polanyi pilfered Marx’s theory of the double-movement
and rewrote it as a story drawn from Catholic theology concerning the
transgression of Natural Law, according to which fascism is seen as the
regrettable but understandable consequence of the destruction of the communal
bonds of family and nation. By that view, capitalism is the Fall, fascism the
divine punishment, and community, as it happens, is a euphemism for the natural
bonds of family, race, and nation.

Beck’s theory of risk is similarly a theory
of divine retribution for the transgression of a transcendent moral law. Like
Tönnies, Beck and Polanyi drew heavily on Catholic theology, and for that
reason related a very accessible story for anyone already familiar with
biblical narrative. Both placed an emphasis on the deleterious effects of traversing
national borders. Both were heavily invested in their preservation as that
which bounds the euphemistically-described and endangered “society.” To read
these narratives as something other than literary expressions of conservative
impulses and anxieties about the erosion of “traditional” authority and
norms—in other words, expressions of the private self-interest of the
managerial heads of white, normative households and other corporations—requires
a remarkably selective reading, if not outright acceptance, of their
implications and “solutions.”

In the late 1930s,
Ranulf posed a blunt question of the sociologists around him: “Is not the rise
of fascism an event which, in due logic, Durkheim ought to have welcomed as
that salvation from individualism for which he had been trying rather gropingly
to prepare the way?” If we pose this question once again, in the wake of Donald
Trump’s election to the US Presidency, the answer, it seems, is in the
ambivalent affirmative. With few exceptions, everyone other than those who
voted for Trump has been blamed for the result of the election. Social
democrats and left liberals have rushed headlong toward celebrating an
ethno-nationalist politics and paradigm. Naomi Klein weighed in to blame neoliberalism,
offering a theory of “global finance” that barely rises above Whig history when
it does not simply repeat the conspiratorial fantasies nurtured by the far
Right, illustrating a determination to diminish the importance of the racism
that is encoded into the Electoral College, voter suppression laws, and the
gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and thereby of the importance of challenging
any of these things, a refusal to admit that the overt stake in Trump’s
election was the restoration of white power and white (household) property and,
as consequence, a tacit acceptance of the same narrow political calculus: “that
white working class people voted for Trump and therefore that they had
legitimate reasons for doing so.” Mark Lilla wrote of liberalism and identity politics
in such a way that restored whiteness to its default setting and universal
status.

Bernie Sanders reached out to President-elect Trump with a suggestion
that while he may oppose him on issues of sexism, racism, and homophobia, he
would be willing to work with him on “the big economic issues,” illustrating a
convenient ignorance of the ways the former are economic issues. As with
Sanders’ insistence that open borders are a capitalist plot and attack on
“working families,” in the UK, Jeremy Corbin and the Labour Party have recently
resorted to the fiction that immigrants drive down wages—as if they are not
aware that it is UK and US law’s deliberate stratification of wages through
visas and passport systems that accomplishes this and not some inherent quality
that migrants carry with them over the border. In response to these efforts,
many such as Farai Chideya have written about a “call to
whiteness,” and it most definitely hinges on an economics or, more precisely,
oikonomic investments and calculations, one that is being re-imagined in some
quarters as the only course available for progressive and radical politics.

Narrowed to its
electoral calculus, the recent rush to embrace economic nationalism is being
constructed on the basis of a lie that “white working class people” voted for
Trump and a corollary refusal to address the racism that is encoded in voting
laws and procedures, not to mention the nexus of race and sex that forms
households and gives material weight to its affections. To be clear, again:
white people overwhelmingly voted for Trump, the larger proportion of whom were
in middle- to upper-income brackets.

The most significant variables were white,
evangelical voters in rural areas and cities under one million people - in other
words, those for whom family values is also an economic theology, or more
precisely, an oikonomics. And so while much has been made of white women not
voting for Clinton, the truth I expect has much to do with the “choice” between
the specter of “Mexican rapists” and the mundane experience of rich, white men
such as Trump treating women as their property and, in the end, fears of
miscegenation and white affection were overwhelming and decisive in a context
where spousal rape laws post-date most marriages.

The point, then, is
not that neoliberalism, or liberalism and individualism, are above critique. It
means, instead, that liberalism runs deeper than anyone imagines because,
contrary to a philosophical liberalism, we are not talking about
freely-floating ideas but material investments in whiteness as the property and
value of masterful oikonomic management. Liberalism will not furnish a critique
of itself… read more: